No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  The president was asleep when news of the invasion reached Washington, but before the sun rose, lights were on at the State Department. At Chequers, Churchill was also asleep, having given strict orders never to be awakened before eight unless Britain herself had been invaded. At exactly eight, the prime minister’s secretary John Colville knocked on Churchill’s door. “Tell the B.B.C. I will broadcast at nine tonight,” Churchill said. Minutes later, the prime minister’s valet, Frank Sawyers, walked from room to room breaking the news. Anthony Eden, Churchill’s foreign secretary, who had spent the weekend at Chequers, recalled that when he answered Sawyer’s knock he was handed a large cigar on a silver salver. “The Prime Minister’s compliments,” Sawyers said, “and the German armies have invaded Russia.”

  Churchill spent the rest of the day preparing for his speech. He wanted his countrymen and the entire world to know that he was absolutely committed to Russia’s cause. “I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler,” Churchill explained to Colville before the speech, “and my life is much simplified thereby. If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”

  Finished only twenty minutes before delivery, the speech was vintage Churchill—full of passion and conviction. “No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding . . . . Can you doubt what our policy will be? . . . We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. From this nothing will turn us—nothing . . . . Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid . . . . It follows, therefore, that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and the Russian people . . . .”

  Roosevelt, in contrast, exercised a cautious policy of making haste slowly, keeping in touch with the unfolding events but maintaining a public silence. Indeed, that Sunday evening, he escaped the press by motoring to Princess Martha’s estate in Maryland for a long and leisurely dinner. “Perhaps,” an irritated Ickes mused, “he was not able to make up his mind as to what our attitude should be. It would be just like him to wait for some expression of public opinion instead of giving direction to that public opinion.”

  But, in spite of Harold Ickes’ impatience, Roosevelt had good reason to move slowly. For one thing, his Cabinet was divided on how to respond to the Russian invasion. Whereas Ickes and Hull believed in giving Russia all possible aid, Stimson and Knox, along with General Marshall and the entire General Staff, were convinced that Russia would be unable to contain Hitler. Scarce American equipment sent in haste to the Soviet Union would simply fall into Germany’s hands. Better, Stimson argued, to use “this precious and unforeseen period of respite” to redouble our aid to England and push “with the utmost vigor our movements in the Atlantic theater of operations.”

  Across the United States, opinion was equally divided. For the isolationists, the Russian invasion simply confirmed the wisdom of keeping America out of the war. The struggle between Nazism and communism is “a case of dog eat dog,” Missouri Democrat Bennett Clark argued. “Stalin is as bloody-handed as Hitler. I don’t think we should help either one.” America should rejoice, isolationist opinion held, in watching two hated dictatorships bleed each other to death. For Catholics, who felt bound by a recent papal encyclical which stated that communism was “intrinsically wrong” and that “no one who would save Christian civilization may give it assistance on any understanding whatsoever,” the best action was to do nothing.

  On the political left, confusion reigned. For months, following the Nazi-Soviet pact, communist-leaning organizations had been busily engaged in marching for peace, provoking strikes, and opposing aid to England. With Russia under attack, however, these same forces began to cry out for immediate intervention and massive aid for Russia. Robert Sherwood recalled attending an interventionist rally in Harlem on the Sunday afternoon of the Russian invasion. When he entered the Golden Gate Ballroom, there was a communist picket line in front with placards condemning the Fight for Freedom supporters as “tools of British and U.S. Imperialism.” By the end of the rally, the picket line had totally disappeared. “Within that short space of time,” Sherwood marveled, “the Communist party line had reached all the way from Moscow to Harlem and had completely reversed itself.”

  That same day, in a different part of the city, Michael Quill, the left-leaning head of the Transport Workers of New York, was delivering an angry speech denouncing the imperialist war, arguing that the American worker should have absolutely nothing to do with it. In the middle of his speech, he was handed a note informing him that the Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union. Without missing a beat, Quill totally changed direction, arguing that “we must all unite and fight for democracy.”

  In Campobello, where she sat by her portable radio with her friend Joe Lash and the reporter May Craig, Eleanor was unsure what to make of the news. “Will it be good or bad?” she kept asking. It all depended “on whether the Russians can hold out.” But then “where will our Catholics go?” For his part, Lash felt immensely relieved. “It’s the event I’ve been waiting for since the Nazi-Soviet Pact,” he admitted in his diary. For two years, Lash had been caught in the crossfire between his peace-oriented leftist friends and his own belief that Hitler had to be fought. But now all those divisions were suddenly healed. Still, Lash worried. “I couldn’t believe that Hitler would attack if he wasn’t sure of victory.”

  From morning to night, Eleanor and her friends listened to the radio. Finally, with a little persuasion, Eleanor agreed to call her husband to get more information, using the island’s single telephone connection. “He said he thought it would be helpful,” Eleanor repeated to Lash, “except for the Catholics.” He said “Hitler expected to defeat Russia in two months . . . . We asked whether he would go on radio. Said he wouldn’t. Said it was too damn hot.’”

  Yet, when the president finally met with the press in his office on June 24, he made it all sound easy. “Of course we are going to give all the aid we possibly can to Russia,” he declared with a smile, never for a moment betraying the anxiety he must have felt in deciding to overrule his military advisers and stake everything on the chance that the Red Army could hold out until the onset of winter, much longer than anyone was predicting it could at the time. His only problem, he said, was that he had absolutely no idea what the Soviet government actually needed. Indeed, so scant were the diplomatic reports from Russia that he “probably knew less of what was going on in Moscow at this time than any desk man in a newspaper office.” And even after a specific list was obtained, he emphasized, “we can’t simply go to Mr. Garfinkel’s [department store] to fill the order.’

  Still thirsting for firsthand knowledge three weeks later, Roosevelt sent Hopkins on an arduous double mission to London and Moscow. The first leg of his circuitous journey took him to Montreal, to Gander, Newfoundland, and from there to Prestwick, Scotland. By the time he reached Britain, he was seriously ill, but, as usual, he refused to rest, insisting that he be taken immediately to see Churchill. The two men discussed the new landscape created by the Russian invasion. Hopkins assured Churchill that the president wanted Britain to have first lien on all planes, tanks, and munitions, but he needed to know in detail how the British and Russian requests could fit together. When Hopkins left Chequers, he asked Churchill if there was anything he wanted to tell Stalin. “Tell him, tell him,” Churchill said, “tell him that he can depend on us . . . . Goodbye—God bless you, Harry.”

  After a difficult journey seated on a machine gunner’s stool near the tail of an unheated PBY plane, the ailing envoy arrived in Moscow and was taken inside the Kremlin through a series of long corridors to meet Joseph Stalin. Hopkins later wrote: “No man could forget the picture of the dictator of Russia . . . an austere, rugged determined figure in boots that shone like mirrors, stout baggy trousers and snug fitting blouse. He wore no
ornament, military or civilian. He’s built close to the ground, like a football coach’s dream of a tackle. He’s about five feet six, about a hundred and ninety pounds. His hands are huge, as hard as his mind. His voice is harsh but ever under control. He’s a chain smoker, probably accounting for the harshness of his carefully controlled voice. He laughs often enough, but it’s a short laugh, somewhat sardonic, perhaps. There is no small talk in him.”

  Hopkins was elated by his intimate conversation with Stalin. He found the Russian leader intelligent, courteous, and direct. “Not once did he repeat himself. He talked as he knew his troops were shooting—straight and hard . . . . He smiled warmly. There was no waste of word, gesture, nor mannerism . . . . Joseph Stalin knew what he wanted, knew what Roosevelt wanted, and he assumed that you knew.”

  In four hours of conversation, Hopkins saw no signs of the cruel and ruthless temperament that lay behind Stalin’s mask of politeness. Like so many other Americans who met Stalin during the war, Hopkins came away impressed. “There was little in Stalin’s demeanor in the presence of foreigners,” Russian envoy Charles Bohlen later admitted, “that gave any clue of the real nature and character of the man.” Yet this son of an alcoholic who began working as a troubleshooter for Lenin, organizing a series of bank robberies to fill the revolutionary coffers, and eventually rose to the top of the Communist Party, was directly responsible for the deaths of millions of his own countrymen. Through his forced collectivization of the Russian peasants in the twenties and his purge trials of the thirties, which resulted in the execution of every rival Bolshevik figure, Stalin had spread a reign of terror through the entire Russian nation. Hopkins must have had some sense of these events, but Russia was still so embroiled in mystery that he was able, like Churchill, to let the past fade away before the unfolding spectacle of the Nazi invasion.

  As Hopkins listened to Stalin talk, even with the thunder of the German army rumbling in the distance, he came away convinced that Russia could and would hold out. However many Russian troops were killed, there were always more to take their place. “I feel ever so confident about this front,” Hopkins cabled Roosevelt. “The morale of the population is exceptionally good. There is unbounded determination to win.” Stalin admitted that the Soviets had been taken by surprise and that the German army was “of the very best,” with “large reserves of food, men, supplies and fuel,” but he argued that the Red Army had superiority in numbers of divisions. Moreover, the Germans were already finding that moving mechanized forces through the vast plains and thick forests of Russia was “very different than moving them over the boulevards of Belgium and France.”

  The primary need of the Russian army, Stalin told Hopkins, was for vast quantities of light anti-aircraft guns to give protection against low-flying planes. The second need was aluminum, to be used in the construction of airplanes. It was this request that convinced Hopkins that Stalin was viewing the war on a long-range basis. “A man who feared immediate defeat would not put aluminum so high on the list of priorities.” The third need was machine guns. “The outcome of the war in Russia,” Stalin told Hopkins, “would largely depend on . . . adequate equipment, particularly in aircraft, tanks and anti-aircraft.” In short, the Soviet Union, like Britain, was depending on America’s miraculous mass production to produce the weapons and material needed to win the war.

  • • •

  Though this sublime faith in America’s productive capacity would ultimately be justified, the mobilization effort in the summer of 1941 remained disappointing. There were growing signs of forward movement in a number of different areas, but overall production was still lagging. In July, Life devoted a special issue to analyzing America’s progress in national defense over the previous year. “The country is awake,” Life concluded, “though not yet aroused.” More than $30 billion had been set aside for defense, yet there was still not a lot to show, since a high proportion of the funds had gone into plant expansion and tooling up.

  Among the crucial instruments of war, planes were still a major problem. Though a bottleneck in engines had been cleared up, propellers were now in short supply, and the production process as a whole was nowhere near as fast as it would have to be for the U.S. to catch up with Germany. Production of medium tanks had made excellent progress in 1941—Chrysler’s new twenty-eight-ton tank was two months ahead of schedule—but the army still had no heavy tanks. The “brightest spot” in defense was smokeless-powder production, which had been almost nonexistent two years before and was now moving so rapidly that cutbacks might soon be possible. Pride could also be taken in General Motors’ AC Spark Plug factory, which had turned from spark plugs to .50-caliber machine guns and was now rifling forty barrels in the time it used to take to rifle one, but production of armor plate was behind schedule, as was production of antitank guns. Surely, Life concluded, the defense situation in 1941 was better than it had been in 1940, but, considering the urgency of the crisis, things “should be a lot better.”

  The president’s men refused to acknowledge failure. They defined the first year of the mobilization process as an “educational phase.” They likened the president to a baseball promoter who had built a new stadium and a new team from the bottom up and was now waiting to get the rest of the county into the grandstands. Then the game of total defense could really begin.

  To be sure, a tooling-up period of six to twelve months was inevitable in the production of complex munitions, but the president could not escape the charge that he lost precious time in 1940 by failing to push business harder toward all-out war production. He had had an election to win and needed to make peace with business in order to win it, but a price had been paid.

  Aluminum was a case in point. The previous November, Edward Stettinius, NDAC commissioner for industrial materials, had assured the country that there was more than enough aluminum for everything in sight. For forty-eight years, one monopoly, ALCOA, had been supplying America with 100 percent of all the aluminum it needed, and now, Stettinius claimed, this “good’ monopoly was gearing up for the peak load required for the airplane defense program.

  Not everyone agreed that ALCOA was a good monopoly. For two years, Thurman Arnold’s antitrust division in the Justice Department, “the battered citadel of a romantic lost cause,” to use I. F. Stone’s words, had been waging war against ALCOA. Arnold’s antitrust suit, which had generated thousands of pages of testimony but was still to be decided, had the fervent support of Eleanor Roosevelt, who saw in the struggle the old fighting spirit of the New Deal.

  “There never was a monopoly as tight and as agile as ALCOA,” observed Arthur Goldschmidt, who was working for Harold Ickes at the time. “First they had patent control, then they moved to control power, then mining. Everything they did was calculated to keep supply down and prices up. They even kept the auto industry—no mean feat—from having scrap, fearing it would lower prices.”

  Limited supply was damaging enough in peacetime; in wartime, it was catastrophic, for, even as Stettinius was heaping praise on ALCOA’s unlimited capacity, ALCOA was unable to fill the defense orders already on its books. “As soon as Roosevelt made his speech calling for fifty thousand planes,” Goldschmidt recalled, “I took out a yellow pad and figured out how much aluminum was necessary for each plane, recognizing that bombers take more than fighters. When I totaled up the figures, it was clear that the astronomical amount needed was way beyond what ALCOA was producing.” Worse still, since no one at ALCOA was willing to admit this fact in public, the OPM was still discouraging others from entering the field.

  It took the creation of the Truman Committee, charged in April 1941 with responsibility for investigating the national defense program, to spur new companies into the field. As one airplane company after another testified at hearings to delays in manufacturing as a result of the shortages of aluminum, the ALCOA men finally had to admit that they simply could not keep up with demand. The government responded to the admission by bringing Reynolds Metal Company i
nto the aluminum business with a generous Reconstruction Finance Corporation loan to finance construction of a large new plant. But invaluable time had been lost. “When the story of the war comes to be written,” Harold Ickes testified at the hearings, “if it has to be written that it was lost, it may be because of the recalcitrance of ALCOA.”

  In July, while Hopkins was in Russia discussing Russia’s desperate need for aluminum, the OPM announced a two-week nationwide scrap drive to collect worn-out pots and pans for remelting and reuse. It was estimated that five thousand dishpans, ten thousand coffee percolators, two thousand roasters, and twenty-five hundred double boilers would make one plane. All told, it was hoped that the aluminum gathered from American housewives would make about two thousand planes.

  The response was overwhelming. Enthusiastic householders, delighted at the call for service, hauled an astonishing collection of aluminum wares to their village greens—Uncle Mike’s coffeepot, Aunt Margaret’s frying pan, the baby’s milk dish, skillets, stew pots, cocktail shakers, ice-cube forms, artificial legs, cigar tubes, watch cases, and radio parts. Great piles of the precious metal accumulated.

  All along, Roosevelt had argued that, once the energies and passions of the American people were aroused, America’s home front would win the war. The aluminum drive was the first test of the president’s belief, and the people came through with spectacular ingenuity and imagination. In Cleveland, a popular dairy promised one free ice-cream cone to every child who turned in a piece of aluminum. In Tacoma, a police judge declared that every fine assessed during the scrap drive would have added to it one piece of aluminum. In Lubbock, Texas, a likeness of Adolf Hitler was placed in the middle of the courthouse square as a target for the pots and pans hurled by the citizens. In Albany, Mrs. Lehman, wife of the governor, turned in two dozen pieces of kitchenware, including an ice-cream mold. “Many a good dessert has it molded for this family,” she said.